Making Customer Analytics Make Money

Organizations have more customer levers to pull than ever from loyalty rewards offers to in-store technologies to direct mail campaigns. Yet, while most executives are already swimming in “Big Data,” many still struggle to gain actionable insights from this data to understand which of these programs not only engage customers, but actually drive profitability. With or without a loyalty program, it is difficult to determine where else your customers shop, how much they spend, what their share of wallet is, and how these metrics continuously change based on your decisions (e.g., marketing programs) and external events (e.g., competitor actions).

Isolating the cause-and-effect sales impact of a particular campaign or promotion is nearly impossible given the natural noise in financial data and the many ongoing initiatives you and your competitors have deployed at any given time. However, leveraging in-market experiments and analyzing data beyond your four walls provides insights about how much you can grow with each customer segment, and where you are losing to competition. Leading retailers, such as Big Lots, are conducting effective in-market experiments to uncover which ideas work, which should be fine-tuned, and with which customers, stores, or markets programs work best. Join one of our conference keynote sessions, Using Smart Business Experiments to Transform Big Data into Big Value, to learn more about how this Test & Learn® approach can drive significant profit improvement. In the meantime, read this article to learn more about in-market experimentation of customer programs. The white paper discusses how a leading retailer generated over $15 million in profit improvement by leveraging Test & Learn® to evaluate and refine its promotional direct mail strategy.